Ramblings from the creator of HomeSite, TopStyle, FeedDemon and Glassboard Android.

Monday, October 27, 2008

It’s a common complaint of software developers: their customers keep asking for features that already exist. That’s happened to me more times than I can count, and it used to frustrate me – until I realized I was the problem. I had designed those features so poorly, or buried them so thoroughly, that they weren’t being noticed.

I bring this up because I keep seeing comments from people saying they’d like to use FeedDemon, but they really need a “sharing” feature like the one Google Reader has. Or I’ll read a review of FeedDemon that says the lack of a sharing feature is a strike against it. Which bothers me to no end since FeedDemon has had sharing for quite some time (and NewsGator Online has had it even longer).

The reason so many people miss FeedDemon’s sharing feature isn’t due to “user error,” of course, but because I made it too geeky and too hard to find. In order to share an article in the current version of FeedDemon, you have to copy it to a “clippings folder” that has an RSS feed – and as you can see, it’s far from obvious how to do this:

Click an obscure icon under the article’s headline to display a menu of clippings folders

Choose the clippings folder you want to copy the article to

Not exactly the simplest approach, huh?

So I decided to rectify this in the upcoming FeedDemon 2.8 by adding a single, obvious “Share” link – which is how I should’ve done it in the first place.

Simply click “Share,” and FeedDemon will copy the article to your shared clippings. New users who don’t have any shared clippings (and probably don’t know what they are) can still use this feature, because it takes care of configuring everything without all the “geek speak” of the current version.

PS: I hope to release a public beta of FeedDemon 2.8 within the next 10 days.

Friday, October 17, 2008

“One of the more challenging tasks developers face — regardless of whether they develop desktop applications, web applications or even widgets — is designing a feature in a way that not only hides the technical details, but also respects the end user by not asking them to do too much work.”

I talk about how adding a feature requires thinking about the extra work you’d require of your customers if you don’t design it correctly, with FeedDemon’s tagging features used as examples.

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

First off, I’ve added tags to FeedDemon’s subscription tree, as shown in this screenshot (click to enlarge):

Selecting a tag in the tree displays a newspaper containing all posts with that tag.

I’ve also added “suggested tags” to the tag editor, which attempts to recommend tags for the selected post:

I’ll be fine-tuning the tagging features even more before this version is released, of course, but I plan to keep it simple. I know there’s a lot of tagging-related stuff I could add, but complexity is something I hope to avoid :)

Monday, October 06, 2008

I’ve been adding support for tagging to FeedDemon, and I wanted to pass the new features by FeedDemon customers to see if I’m missing anything.

The way it works so far is that FeedDemon’s “Subscriptions Home” report now includes a list of tags you’ve used, as shown in the screenshot below (click to enlarge):

Clicking one of these tags displays a newspaper showing all posts you’ve added that tag to (click to enlarge):

As you can see from the above screenshot, the newspaper now shows each post’s tags, and clicking one of these tags shows all posts which have that tag. Tagging a post is as simple as clicking the new “Edit Tags” icon and then entering a list of tags, or selecting from tags you’ve already used:

You can also manage your tags in bulk, renaming or deleting them across all posts:

Tags added to posts in synchronized feeds are passed to NewsGator in the background, so any tags you add in FeedDemon will be available in NewsGator Online or any other application which syncs with NewsGator and supports tagging.

So, that covers the basics of where FeedDemon’s tagging support currently stands. Beyond these features, is there anything important I’m missing? What tagging features would you like to see?